Sponge
Credit: By Stevendepolo on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Spundge, a platform which offers journalists a one-stop-shop to search social and the wider web, store 'notebooks' of content, and publish stories directly to social and blogging platforms, has partnered with Getty Images and Reuters.

The partnership means images from Getty and photography and text from Reuters will be available to Spundge Pro customers. Existing wire customers can verify their accounts with a username and password within a Pro Spundge account and use the content straight away.

Those not already a Getty customer can purchase content from both within Spundge Pro, with the platform taking a cut of the revenues.

Reuters and Getty Images will appear as 'firehoses' of content for those with a Spundge Pro account, alongside free firehoses such as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Spundge also offers its own firehose of content which currently contains around 100,000 RSS feeds.

The Getty firehose offers both a creative library of stock images and an editorial library of news images. This content can be filtered, and searched for based on factors such as orientation. The Reuters firehose offers images and text. When content is found, images, for example, will display information such as the credit or caption, for the journalist's information.

In an announcement, Spundge said "the agreement with Getty Images gives Spundge users a simple, legal way to access great content".

"The entire process — from image search to selection to purchase and publishing — is all done within Spundge.

"It's the easiest way to source, select and pay for stock and editorial images, and then quickly integrate them into content that can be published on any website, or in an email newsletter."

A Spundge Pro account costs $9 a month. Spundge was launched in September last year and was described at the time, by director of content Craig Silverman, as a "Bloomberg terminal for journalists".

"It’s an end to workflow madness and the start of something more efficient, more collaborative, and built for what journalists actually do," he said at the time.

Spundge is now integrated with four blogging platforms: Wordpress, Tumblr, Symphony and TypePad, and offers free firehoses of content from social networks, with recent additions including SoundCloud and Slideshare.

The platform is built around 'notebooks', which is where users can curate content. This content can then be dragged into stories and published direct from Spundge or embedded into other content management systems, or the notebooks themselves can now be embedded, offering the ability to perform "real-time curation", Silverman told Journalism.co.uk.

The platform has also launched a live chat feature, which enables users to communicate within a notebook or story. One example where this could be particularly useful, Silverman said, is in breaking news situations, where a number of journalists may be working on coverage in different newsrooms.

Update: This article was updated to clarify that while Getty Images content is available to those not already customers to purchase from within Spundge, Reuters content is only available to those already customers of the wire. A correction has also been made to the number of RSS feeds Spundge offers through its own firehose which should be 100,000, not 100.

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